When comparing Stencyl vs Duality, the Slant community recommends Stencyl for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?”Stencyl is ranked 5th while Duality is ranked 32nd. The most important reason people chose Stencyl is:

Power users can also write code in Haxe (similar to Actionscript 3) to create their own custom classes and extend the engine.

Pros

Pro

Haxe scripting available for advanced users

Power users can also write code in Haxe (similar to Actionscript 3) to create their own custom classes and extend the engine.

Pro

Cross-Platform

Publish iOS, Android, Flash, Windows and Mac games without code.

Pro

No coding required, great drag & drop interface

Visual scripting in Stencyl is based on the MIT Scratch project, which was designed to teach programming. Script elements fit together like puzzle pieces, ensuring that data and function types cannot be mismatched.

Pro

Great performance on every platform

Stencyl exports your games to native code so they have great performance on every platform.

Pro

The original concept for Ghost Song was created using Stencyl

The original concept for Ghost Song was created using Stencyl 3.x

Pro

Open source

The full source code is available on GitHub, where the framework is actively developed. All of the editor, core and plugin code is written in C#.

Pro

Great editor

Duality includes a powerful visual editing system that can be used for previewing, integrating, editing and testing game content.

Pro

Live reload of code and assets

Pro

Very extensible

Because both Core and Editor are completely plugin-based, Duality not only incorporates a clean and modular design, but is also very extensible - even if it wasn't Open Source. In fact, most of the standard editing capabilities comes in form of Editor plugins.

Pro

Built-in physics and lighting

Pro

Friendly to version control systems

It can be configured to serialize all data in a text-based format, which has been structurally optimized for version control systems.

Pro

Used in commercial projects

It has been used in a production environment without burning the place to the ground. Supposedly artist-proof editor workflow with an API for tailoring the system to fit your team.

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Cons

Con

Updated

It needs much to improve for mobile games, it was left in the era of Flash games. In Android you can not even put the native keyboard, you can not access things like native camera, GPS or native text input.

Con

Only available via subscription

There should be an option to buy it outright, especially considering it is written by a one man team....this is not exactly an Adobe level enterprise with shareholders, so there is no excuse!

Con

Not a powerful engine

Should be used for basic games only.

Con

Slow release cycle

Con

Tile system is somewhat inflexible

Con

Visual Studio required

To have possibility for scripting you have to download entire Visual Studio and spend 10 GB of free space

Con

Requires windows for development

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